NTL Reflections 2025 Johan Cece Castillo
Beyond the Classroom: My Journey to National Board Certification
My name is Johan Cece Castillo, and I became a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT) in English as a New Language through the CTU’s Nurturing Teacher Leadership (NTL) program. I currently teach English as a Second Language to high school students in Humboldt Park.
My journey from new – to novice – to teacher leader began in Montellano, an underserved town in the Dominican Republic. Though resources were limited, I was determined to become a teacher who advocated for young learners with scarce opportunities, like me. By working at a ministry after high school to earn money, and asking friends for help to fund my studies, I was able to go to college and become the first in my family to earn a degree to become a teacher.
After teaching in the Dominican Republic for seven years, I moved to Chicago where I have continued my teaching career for the past four years. I taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and was also the English Language Program Teacher (ELPT) for three years at a K-12 school in the heart of Little Village. I encountered many challenges as a teacher at that school that were similar to those I faced when teaching in the Dominican Republic. Our students experienced deep, systemic needs that extended far beyond the classroom such as the inaccessibility to content because of language barriers, housing instability, traumas due to exposure to violence in their day-to-day lives, and the lack of equal opportunities for brown and other people of color. Like in Montellano, DR, students in Little Village lacked resources at home, forcing them to drop out of school to work. Also, literacy levels were below average in both Spanish and English. While I knew I could bring many of my skills and strategies that I used in the DR to this small CPS school on the west side, I knew I needed to learn more about my Chicago students and how to make connections with them to help them feel safe enough to learn English and high school content at the same time. So I chose to join the Nurturing Teacher Leadership (NTL) program and sit for National Board Certification. Then, during my second year of working on becoming an NBCT, there was an influx of Newcomers from Spanish speaking countries into my school who had limited to non-existent abilities to understand and communicate in English. In just two years, the school’s population surged to over 90% English learners. I found myself having to learn to work in a different reality: overcrowded classes with students from many different Spanish speaking countries who came from different cultures and had varying levels of academic experience. This was a huge shift for me from previously teaching a more culturally homogenous group of students who’d been in school for many years. Also, our Newcomers had wide and varied needs including unidentified learning disabilities. Many lacked any educational experience.
Needing to be able to teach every student to the best of my ability was all the more reason for me to pursue and continue my NBC learning through NTL. My cohort facilitators and colleagues helped me navigate the methods and processes that worked the best for each of my students. I am very grateful for NTL.
Through the professional development my mentors provided, NTL taught me how to address my students’ social-emotional needs while deconstructing the curriculum which was not built for students like them. For example, at that time, my school was using the district-created curriculum that had few supports for students who had little to no educational experience prior to their arrival in the US. Many of my students came to the school reading at the 1st and 2nd grade level, but were going to graduate or age-out of school in a few short years. I had to plan to teach English as a new language using differentiation strategies that serviced all our Newcomers. This is where my NTL participation helped me learn to modify instruction and accommodate the Newcomers’ specific needs using structures such as the Sheltered Instruction model and Scaffolded Differentiation. I learned these approaches from my mentors while preparing the “Differentiation in Instruction” portfolio component I needed to master as part of the National Board Certification process. One way I differentiated instruction for my students was by reducing the language complexity of student reading materials and in-class assessments to measure content learning while adapting for language proficiency needs. I also scaffolded my differentiation by increasing my use of visual tools and supports where necessary and reducing scaffolds when the students were ready for more challenging work. Before coming to NTL, I did not have the experience or tools to properly differentiate content while supporting language development. One of my students, in particular, benefited significantly from this type of differentiation because, unlike her peers in her class, she was ready to take on the challenge of understanding past tense in English. While another student in the same class, with a significantly higher language proficiency, was able to complete sentences independently to develop English writing skills using the differentiated materials I designed to adapt the district-provided curriculum. A third student, who had only entering level English proficiency, benefitted from me providing images with pre-typed Spanish labels, but with a place for him to write in the English words, while listening to instruction in class. This student was able to make the direct connections between the two languages and begin to develop his English vocabulary, despite being exposed to English for only a few weeks at the time. While challenging for me at first, differentiation has become second nature to my practice and it is benefitting all my students.
Modifying the district- provided curriculum to make it appropriate and accessible for my students is something I continue to do each school year based on the specific needs of each new student group. Without NTL, I may not have received the professional development I needed to learn how to make these types of adaptations for my students. I also learned how to reduce the complexity of the content while maintaining the integrity of the lessons, and changing the lessons altogether when appropriate. For example, one such unit about communities did not reflect the experiences and current lives of my students and their neighborhood. Instead, I worked with students to teach them, in English, ways to describe healthy and safe communities, and to compare and contrast community life between their home country and their new neighborhood in Chicago. Through this, my students acquired new English vocabulary as well as the skills to hold critical conversations about social issues in English with very little support from me.
Most importantly, though, I wanted to learn how to adapt my instruction to make culturally responsive lessons and feature them in my National Board portfolio. NTL helped me do that. For example, I fostered a nurturing environment by grouping my students according to language proficiency needs and designing individual and small group tools as resources to help them become more successful in their lessons. I also devised a social science unit about topics that I knew my students would be able to connect to, such as having them watch Pixar ‘shorts’ and discussing them using English vocabulary and discussion stems. Students in one particular group loved ‘shorts’ and movies, which helped me to engage them in conversation, a long-term goal for my English Learners (ELs). My students from various Central and South American countries, as well as from Mexico, felt safe comparing the values of society and the resources of their home countries with those found in the Little Village community. This was a powerful learning experience for my students because I taught them not only how to have these discussions in English, but also empowered them to begin having discussions about social justice issues that were important and relevant to them. My students became increasingly engaged in advocating for raising awareness about the basic human needs of peoples living outside of the US, such as the lack of availability of public transportation, limited number of accessible grocery stores, and lack of regular access to clean water. These types of lessons helped my students learn how to communicate clearly with others in English about these issues in both school, home, and public settings as well as on social media. Before joining NTL, I would not have thought about unifying these topics to develop language and content skills simultaneously.
Although rewarding, the process of becoming an NBCT was challenging. During my two candidacy years, I faced issues in my personal life. My family was struck by a devastating blow. My sister’s middle son was taken from us by violence in an armed robbery back home in the Dominican Republic. I struggled through the heavy “winter blues” of a Chicago January, many changes of scheduling and practices at my former school, and the obstacles of students leaving mid-year because of the changing rules in the city for how long unhoused families could stay in shelters. Yet, in those darkest moments, I was not alone. My mentors and my NTL cohort became the staff that held me up. I never lost sight of the impact my NBC work would have on my students, and I chose to believe that the struggle would be worth the prize. I persevered through this rigorous process because I had already seen the impact the implementation of my learning was making on my own teaching practice, and in turn, on my students’ learning and well-being. For example, I learned different approaches to engage students in fun ways to learn content while acquiring a second language. I had them draw and conduct gallery walks comparing and contrasting their home countries to the US, as one example. I also learned how to use inquiry-based Webquests to conduct research which, in turn, helped me teach my ELs how to master technological skills such as conducting online research in English. Additionally, I learned from my mentors how to develop and utilize student-based self-assessment tools. Teaching students how to self-assess provided them with a tangible connection, in English, to the learning they were expected to achieve in the class. What I had learned in NTL supported the ENL strategy of metacognitive processing, a tool I then taught my language learners to use in order to think about their learning and daily procedures using English.
Additionally, in NTL, I learned the importance of data collection and the identification of students’ needs to guide how, not just what, I teach my EL students. For example, I collected assessment data across different content areas to compare to that of English proficiency assessments. This helped me determine which English skills I should teach to support my students’ content area development in their other classes. I also learned how to use surveys to collect information about students’ previous academic life, study habits at home, and other details relevant to each student. NTL taught me not only valuable strategies for data collection and organization but also how to use this data to maximize its reach. One example of this is that my parent contact and interactive communication increased, and I built a community with my students’ families. Parents have told me how comfortable they now felt coming to meetings at the school about their child’s academic progress, or participating in school activities, something that was not widely occurring before I developed the skills from NTL to connect and communicate with parents. My outreach and family partnerships also led to higher attendance and homework completion rates.
The tears were many, but the triumph was greater when I finally opened that email and read the words: “You have achieved.”
Today, as an NBCT, I remain committed to continuous professional growth and advocacy. Although I had to change schools while awaiting my NBC results because my position was cut, I moved to a new school in Humboldt Park with many of the same student needs as my former school. Similar to me, these students also come from places around the world where resources are limited and education is not easily accessible. But I also know that because students see me, in the classroom supporting and helping them, someone they can identify with because of similar backgrounds and life experiences, they see me as a model for them. Making those connections helps me as I continue to relentlessly work to connect families with the school and advocate for these students and their right to have access to a high quality education. In less than a year at my new school I have managed to identify and gather valuable data about where my students stand in their language acquisition process and use it to create authentic lessons that incorporate grade level content, student interest, linguistic support, and cultural relevance. And all because I made the choice to pursue National Board Certification through the Nurturing Teacher Leadership program.
